Users increasingly turn to large language models for emotional support, yet little is known about how these models actually conduct a psychotherapy interaction. We introduce an ontology of ten therapeutic moves: compact, function-based categories grounded in the MULTI-60 inventory, validated through an annotation campaign with five licensed psychologists, and scaled with a judge-based approach that matches expert agreement. Applying it to real counseling transcripts and model-led sessions, we compare the move distributions between human clinicians and a panel of frontier models. Models over-use inquiry at up to three times the human rate, neglect psychoeducation, and are strongly context-anchored: they carry forward strategies initiated by a human clinician but rarely initiate them themselves. Exposing the ontology as a set of tools roughly halves the mean deviation from the human move distribution and improves turn-level alignment with human therapist by 7-9 percentage points, without any fine-tuning.
Large language models are increasingly consulted at moments of distress, yet single-turn benchmarks neither test sustained exchanges nor distinguish between users. We built a personality-aware evaluation in which four widely used models advised several synthetic help-seekers, each given a psychometrically specified pro...
Pablo Fonseca, R. Rodríguez-Carvajal, Rafael A. Calvo· 0 citations
LLM-based simulated clients are increasingly used to train novice counselors, evaluate LLM therapists, and generate synthetic data. However, current simulators produce overly cooperative clients that disclose too readily, accept therapeutic reframes without resistance, and resolve core issues within a single session. W...
Sahand Sabour, NG TszYam, Yaqian Chen et al.· 1 citation· ⚡1
How does change begin in therapy? This article suggests that each theoretical perspective reveals only part of the whole. Change often arises not only through insight, but also when something small shifts in everyday life. Drawing on systems thinking and the philosophy of Bruno Latour, the article seeks to show that pr...
The article analyses the capabilities and limitations of large language models’ (LLMs) powering chat interfaces, such as ChatGPT, in the context of their potential use as “psychotherapists”. The authors relate this issue to the principles of psychodynamic psychotherapy, in which interpersonal relationships, unconscious...
Mateusz Łabuz, Paweł Szczęsny, Katarzyna Mika-Łabuz· Ethics and Information Techn...· 0 citations
Large language models (LLMs) are often compared with the human mind because their decision-making is complex, non-linear and difficult to interpret. Psychological methods developed to investigate unobservable mental processes may therefore help examine LLM behaviour, particularly in government and healthcare. Building...
Oliver A. Guidetti, Reza Ryan· arXiv.org· 0 citations
Recent advancements in large language models have revolutionized the field of psychological counseling, especially in the context of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). While the success of CBT relies heavily on dynamic decision-making informed by the client's real-time mental state, this aspect has often been overlook...
Zi-Mu Wang, Yi-Wen Jiang, Xiang-Yu Zhao et al.· 0 citations
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